"There's been some progress. There's been some horrific bombings, of course, but there's also a decline in sectarian violence," Bush said as he met in the Oval Office with the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus.

....

He spoke as a string of bomb attacks in Iraq on Monday killed more than 20 people and wounded dozens of others, one day after insurgents killed 50 people and one week after a series of blasts killed about 200 people.

Even the AFP (The Agence France-Presse) had to put a bit of the truth in the final paragraph. Why was this not the lead?

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren't counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Others, however, say that not counting bombing victims skews the evidence of how well the Baghdad security plan is protecting the civilian population - one of the surge's main goals.

"Since the administration keeps saying that failure is not an option, they are redefining success in a way that suits them," said James Denselow, an Iraq specialist at London-based Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank.

Let us use the Bush Doctrine of Selective Information to reach a different conclusion: Nearly 100% of US citizens want the US out of Iraq now, if you don't count all the people who get their information from Fox, Rush or Drudge.

Iraqi insurgency: Cheney vs. Reality

So let's not call it "sectarian violence", and let's avoid such loaded terms as "civil war" and "miserable failure". Let's pretend that only a few Iraqis don't want us in their country so the people killing our brave soldiers and each other are simply part of an "Iraqi Insurgency".

Vice-President Dick Cheney is famous for being so utterly wrong about the Iraqi Insurgency being in the "last throes" in 2005 and still celebrates the "enormous success" of the Iraqi Occupation in 2007. In reality, the exact opposite is true on both counts: The insurgency is stronger now than ever, and the Iraqi War has been a worse quagmire than Vietnam. In other words, the liberals were right and the conservatives were wrong. Again.

In other words Cheney has it exactly backwards. The US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is feeding terrorism, not preventing or lessening it. "They" won't follow us home if we leave. But they might if we don't.

As if to put an exclamation point on the State Department report, the Saudis were constrained to arrest some 172 persons involved in al-Qaeda terror cells in the Kingdom, who were planning to hijack planes and fly them into the Saudi oil fields. If they targeted the oil facilities cleverly, the terrorists could have taken 10% of the world petroleum supply off the market, at least for a while.

The left is oddly silent in one area. Whenever the Israelis hit a military target anywhere near a mosque or an Islamic shrine, the outcry from the liberals was deafening. But when Muslims attack holy shrines of another Muslim sect, the left merely continues to go after Bush.

KARBALA, Iraq (AFP) - A suicide car bomber detonated his payload on a crowded street near a revered Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Karbala on Saturday, killing at least 55 people and wounding nearly 160 others.

"Many of the wounded are women and children," said Salim Kadhim, spokesman for the Karbala health department. "Many of them are in a serious condition, so the number of dead is likely to rise."

A senior police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the attack had been carried out by a suicide bomber, the deadly hallmark of Iraq's Sunni insurgency.

The blast erupted 200 metres (yards) from the shrine of Imam Abbas, the second holiest in Karbala, at 7:10 pm (1510 GMT) when Al-Abbas street was crowded with passers-by, local officials said.

ASHINGTON - A State Department report on terrorism due out next week will show a nearly 30 percent increase in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2006 to more than 14,000, almost all of the boost due to growing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials said Friday.

The annual report's release comes amid a bitter feud between the White House and Congress over funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and a deadline favored by Democrats to begin a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top aides earlier this week had considered postponing or downplaying the release of this year's edition of the terrorism report, officials in several agencies and on Capitol Hill said.

Ultimately, they decided to issue the report on or near the congressionally mandated deadline of Monday, the officials said.

"We're proceeding in normal fashion with the final review of this and expect it to be released early next week," State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said.

A half-dozen U.S. officials with knowledge of the report's contents or the debate surrounding it agreed to discuss those topics on the condition they not be identified because of the extreme political sensitivities surrounding the war and the report.

Based on data compiled by the U.S. intelligence community's National Counterterrorism Center, the report says there were 14,338 terrorist attacks last year, up 29 percent from 11,111 attacks in 2005.

Forty-five percent of the attacks were in Iraq.

....

Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer who also worked in counterterrorism at the State Department, said that while the new report would show major increases in attacks last year in Iraq and Afghanistan, it could chart reductions in mass casualty attacks in the rest of the world.

"The good news is ... we're seeing verifiable and drastic reductions," he said.

Bush's first impulse is always to run away, and his second impulse is always to lie about it. Here we see both in play from the Loyal Bushies. When a report comes out that completely discredits the Bush administrations response to 9/11, Condoleezza Rice, the former National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State, tries to sweep it under the table. When the reality of the situation is that terrorism is on the rise, worldwide, a CIA officer simply lies about it. This is not "spin control": People are dying because of the moral failing of the sphincter conservatives.

Homegrown amateur terror groups such as the Fort Dix Six have supplanted Al Qaeda to pose the most immediate security threat to the U.S., FBI Director Robert Mueller said yesterday.

While his greatest long-term fear was Al Qaeda acquiring a weapon of mass destruction, Mueller said locals bent on the "path to radicalization" and wielding conventional arms and explosives were the main focus for now.

"For some time now, we've been concerned about the growth of homegrown groups," Mueller said at a breakfast with reporters.

Mueller said 9/11 was an inspiration to terrorists worldwide and he expected they would act again within U.S. borders.

"I do not think for a moment that there are not people out there who want to replicate that," Mueller said. "We can anticipate it. There's no doubt in my mind that Al Qaeda is planning against the U.S."

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly agreed, stating the case "underscores the concern that we have had for quite sometime about this so-called homegrown terrorist phenomena."

"We don't know how many other groups such as this might be forming," he said in New York.

The plot was discovered through old-fashioned police work. No torture was necessary, and we didn't have to rip up the Constitution to keep us safe. The exact opposite of the techniques which have failed at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay succeeded in stopping a terrorist attack on US soil.

Meteor Blades over at DailyKos has a good analysis: Fort Dix Six and the Law. The Clinton approach was sneered at by the Bush administration, but the exact opposite is the case: The Clinton Administration was far superior to the Bush Administration when responding to terrorism and threats of terrorism.

A few final thoughts

Isolationism failed in the 30s, now a New Isolationism is packaged as "we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here." Idiots.

Since it was established shortly after 9/11, the number of days the Department of Homeland Security has had the National Threat Advisory threat level at Blue or Green (the lowest levels): Zero. So much for being "safe at home".

So... what ever happened to the anthrax terrorists? Is anyone still looking for them? Or did they happen to find that they were friends of (or at least fellow travelers with) John Ashcroft and the religious right? It's been nearly six years. A few answers should be forthcoming.